What's up, fungal associates? Welcome to completely arbitrary the podcast about trees

and other related topics. I am one of your hosts. My name is Alex Frozen. I am across from

good friend, good dendrologist, good podcast host, Casey Klaft. Hi Alex. Hi Casey. It's

good to see you. It's good to see you. I know I've seen you multiple times already, but

for the listener, this is like a brand new opening. Yes. And why is that case? Well, I just got back

from a fun little adventure. I just got gone for a couple months, did a little bit of traveling.

I went out and collected a bunch of cones. If you follow me on the the old Instagram. That's right. I did a travel

through the US Southern Southern portion of it to try and keep as warm as possible. Ironically, we brought

the cold with us everywhere we went. Yeah. That's unfortunate. You were sleeping out of your truck.

Yeah. Yeah. And it was it was lovely. It was all by design. So it wasn't, you know, we were prepared

for these things. Sure. But my God is still got so cold when you're like, I'm just going to go hike up

here and it's like, I need to go home. Wow. We went on the Shenandoah River, per the song, country roads.

That's the one. Thank you. We were on the south fork, I think, of the Shenandoah River. And it was

a lovely day, but it was so windy. We did a two-nighter thing. And then whenever we would get out,

we had to like go find someplace, make a fire and like be really warm in just, we would freeze

if we didn't. It was a scene. In the fire. Essentially, we sat in the fire. Yeah. Because we were

like shaking and so cold. Geez. This is not fun. We have how many more days of this? It's like dangerous. Yeah.

It was almost dangerous, but not quite dangerous. Well, yes. Casey, you're back. I'm very happy to have you back.

It's going to be huge. Hold as your friend and your podcast host, partner. Hey, I'm happy to be back.

We got a lot of things planned, don't we? Oh, yeah, we do. You got back and we had a, I don't know,

an eight-hour meeting. Yeah, it was a long time. About all the stuff we want to get up to this year for

completely arbitrary. And this episode is one of them. Yeah.

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